Your reply there was a good question, one that went unanswered. Others spring to mind: is fixing the vanilla assets the way scrawl's talking about something the Morrowind modding community can do now? Or does it require more support in the OpenMW engine and the .nif tools? Are we talking just meshes, textures and animations when talking about assets, or other things besides?

To give an example, is it possible to open one of those bittercoast trees in nifscope/3dsmax/etc. and, without needing to completely rebuild it from scratch, produce an identical-looking mesh that is way more efficient than the original asset? Could something be done with more complex assets like NPCs?

To give an example, is it possible to open one of those bittercoast trees in nifscope/3dsmax/etc. and, without needing to completely rebuild it from scratch, produce an identical-looking mesh that is way more efficient than the original asset? Could something be done with more complex assets like NPCs?

Taking original meshes, modifying them a bit and, finally, redistributing them. Sounds illegal to me. If you ask me, rebuilding assets from scratch is the way to go. *cough* MOAR.

ACTUALLY~ The heart never made real gods, not in any canon or any version of the game. It made false gods, by following the mono-myth the player character is one of the only characters in elder scrolls lore to become an actual god.

Do you have a source for that? The monomyth is a concept that precedes the Elder Scrolls by a fair bit (a.k.a. The Hero's Journey, which was actually written as a critique about how many stories and myths involving a great hero fit the same structure). In-universe, TES's monomyth is an attempt to provide a single mythological basis for the otherwise disparate myths of the various cultures, to give a common understanding for said cultures to communicate on such matters, but there's no more truth to it than anything else. There's nothing in it about the Nerevarine becoming a god, or instructing anyone on how to.

Nerevar was Azura's chosen, and the Nerevarine is (possibly) his reincarnation. The Nerevarine was Azura's champion against the false gods, the same Azura that hated the Tribunal for stealing godhood. If the Nerevarine had become a god, Azura would act quite differently toward you. If anything, the Champion of Cyrodiil has more of a claim to godhood than anyone, given that they literally take over for Sheogorath (like Arden Sul did previously). Skyrim's Dragonborn could also be considered. In some views, the Dragonborn is an incarnation of Shor, the chief deity of the Nords (note how Shor is absent in his mead hall). Wulfharth, Tiber Septim, and General Talos are all wrapped up in the myth of the Dragonborn, and all throughout the game of Skyrim people will rightly point out the connection between the your character and Tiber-Septim-who-is-Talos.

If you read the books and all the core canon not even the Deadra are gods, their apotheosis is contextual and just because they can see the "hidden values" and the spokes of the wheel like actual gods can dosn't mean they can effect it.

The Daedric Princes are the embodiment of primordial concepts that always existed. It's also clearly stated that they have limited influence on Mundus because of a divine pact, not because they're not real gods. Do you have a passage or a book that says the Daedric Princes aren't gods?

To date the only entity in the Morrowind story that becomes a true deity is the player character. Because unlike all the pretenders the PC can actually CHANGE values directly, Vivec and the other false ones can SEE the console at the very edge of their vision if they strain.

"See the console"? What do you mean by that? If you're talking about that fan theory that CHIM is a break of the fourth wall talking about the developer console and modding, you should know the person who came up with CHIM for TES disfavored the idea (the same person also says CHIM is a separate thing from godhood). It's a neat fan theory, but that's all it is. Considering Morrowind is also on the XBox, which lacks the console and modding support, it doesn't really fit anyway.

To give an example, is it possible to open one of those bittercoast trees in nifscope/3dsmax/etc. and, without needing to completely rebuild it from scratch, produce an identical-looking mesh that is way more efficient than the original asset? Could something be done with more complex assets like NPCs?

Taking original meshes, modifying them a bit and, finally, redistributing them. Sounds illegal to me. If you ask me, rebuilding assets from scratch is the way to go. *cough* MOAR.

Yet, this is what 80 % of morrowind modders do all the time and Bethesda as never sued anyone for it. It's actually not that common with 100 % original assets in mods for morrowind as far as I've seen. Most mods use modified meshes in one way or another. Except the better bodies clothes of course (these are still often based off of a few base meshes someone made though).

Still, I'd love to see MOAR reborn. Pity I have so little time for it these days.

I imagine that if it turns out the task of reorganising and optimising existing meshes can be automated, we could have an official tool for doing it. I don't see any particular reason why we couldn't have a thread on the forums where our users discuss performing the task manually or promote that they've already done it. Even hosting a link to a download might be fine (although I'd be more comfortable with hosting a link to the Nexus page for a download). It shouldn't be possible to hold OpenMW as an organisation responsible for things OpenMW-the-program's users do unless something really stupid happens like we include a recommendation to use it in a news post as 'OpenMW presents: a mesh replacer that we worked on that makes things go faster'

This is all speculative, though, as my degree isn't in copyright law, and copyright law can be counterintuitive.

Going somewhat off of what AnyOldName3 mentioned, what if there were a tool that could apply a patch/diff to assets based on a checksum? I know nothing of the legal implications, but from my viewpoint, it seems like it could be viable.

This idea could be further extended to include other parts of the game such as scripts, and could perhaps make use of a repository to allow easy sharing. Maybe this would be helpful with fixing certain mods that rely on quirks in the original engine.

Yet, this is what 80 % of morrowind modders do all the time and Bethesda as never sued anyone for it.

FWIW, Bethesda has explicitly stated that using modified assets for mods is fine, as long as it's for the game the original assets came from (e.g. modified Morrowind assets for Morrowind is fine, modified Oblivion or Doom assets for Skyrim is not). You could make a Morrowind Meshes Optimized mod for Morrowind that both vanilla and OpenMW engines benefit from.

That would work, if someone wants to work on a mod specific to/for OpenMW, that's fine. OpenMW can even recommend it, blog about it and even display a link in the launcher if needed, that too is also fine. If OpenMW developers want to work on the project, that too is fine.

What I meant is that OpenMW can't claim this as our work and we shouldn't host it as it is not our IP. That is a can of worms we don't want to be involved with. It should be hosted on Nexus and other mod related websites.

The only 'mod' that OpenMW should officially claim as 'ours', that we host ourselves, is the Example-Suite (or whatever we name it to later). In this, we have full control from cradle to grave of all assets, we know who worked on what and when so that if we ever have to go lawyer up, we have all our ducks-in-a-row that it is our IP and not that of someone/somecompany else.